“Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.”
REVELATION 12:1–4
The house was one of those stark, tan-brick rectangles you find on the outskirts of small Texas towns. It looked like it had been made on a factory assembly line and then installed on a vacant lot that had been scraped clear of all debris. To finish it off, some toxic substance must have been sprinkled on the ground around it to ensure that nothing would grow within twenty yards—no trees, no grass, no flowers, no weeds—just dust and rocks.
Molly was ten minutes early, so she passed the place by and drove on to McDonald’s. The drive to Elgin had been quicker than she had figured, and from her several phone conversations with Dorothy Huff the night before, she had gotten the impression of an elderly woman who would not like people to arrive early—or late—or maybe at all.
Once at the McDonald’s drive-through window, she felt a powerful urge to order an Egg McMuffin, but managed to fight it back by reminding herself that she had already eaten breakfast and that her favorite jeans had been so hard to zip up that she’d peeled them off and worn sweatpants instead. She ordered a large coffee and sipped it sitting in her truck in the parking lot with the air conditioning going full-blast.
The night before, Molly had decided to act right away on Thelma Bassett’s request. She would go see Dorothy Huff, the grandmother who had raised Donnie Ray Grimes to manhood. It was not easy to arrange. When she had called, Mrs. Huff had said she had never talked to a reporter and wasn’t about to start. She had talked to the FBI, but that was her duty as a God-fearing citizen. She had washed her hands of Donnie Ray Grimes, or whatever name he chose to call himself. Anyway, she was feeling too poorly for any of this. You would think, she’d said, that people would be kind enough to leave a sick old lady alone. Then she had hung up. This was exactly the sort of rebuff that spurred Molly on. She had called Thelma Bassett and asked her to call Mrs. Huff and assure the woman that Molly was not a reporter, but a consultant who was helping Thelma to learn more about Samuel Mordecai so she might know what to say to him, when her chance came. Thelma had done this and added that since Mrs. Huff had been so gracious as to offer her help this was what she could do to help—talk to Molly. Dorothy Huff was no pushover, though; her answer was still no—until Molly promised never to write a word about Mrs. Huff. Molly also had to promise that the interview would not be stressful.
Molly leaned out of the truck to dump the undrunk half of her coffee in the gutter. How would it be possible to talk about Samuel Mordecai without it being stressful to the woman who’d raised him? she wondered.
At ten exactly she rang Dorothy Huff’s doorbell. The gaunt, gray-haired woman who answered the door started speaking immediately, with no greeting or preamble. “Since you’ve drove all the way from Austin, I’m gonna try to get through this, but I don’t know. I just don’t rightly know if I’m up to it.” Her words were directed several feet to the left of where Molly was standing. “Some days is worse than others.” She turned and shuffled in her brown carpet slippers across the sparsely furnished living room. “The knees is just as bad as the sacroiliac today. I knowed from when I first opened my eyes before the sun come up and the pain started in so horrible I tell ya most people couldn’t take it. I never should’ve gotten out of that bed. Anyone in their right mind, sick as I am, would’ve just laid there. But then the good Lord knows not everyone does their Christian duty in this world. I told that poor Mrs. Bassett I wanted to help her and she asked me to talk to you, so talk I will. I never been one to baby myself. Never had that luxury. No, ma’am. Always had too much work to get done, keeping a clean and Christian household.” She stopped near a bulky gold velveteen recliner that faced a television set with a 35-inch screen. “Oh, there it is, hitting me bad—the arthritis, in both knees. Ow, Jesus. All this stress”—she waved a hand in Molly’s direction—“makes it worse’n usual.” She dropped into the recliner with a ploof sound. “Might as well take the load off, huh, Mrs. …”
“Cates,” Molly said. “Molly Cates.” The stench of stale smoke and old cigarette butts, only slightly masked by Lysol spray, filled her nostrils, but when Molly glanced around there was no sign of an ashtray or a cigarette pack, or even a lighter. A secret smoker. “Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Huff. I sure am sorry to hear you’re feeling poorly.”
“Well, it’s not like that’s your headline news. Been going on a long time now, long as I can remember. But in this life you just have to take what the good Lord shovels onto you. Nothing for it but to grin and bear it.” To demonstrate her fortitude, she grinned in Molly’s direction. Then she relaxed in the chair and her thin lips snapped back to a pursed, sour position.
Molly fought off a sudden impulse to run to her truck and drive away. Everything about this house and this woman made her want to bolt. But Dorothy Huff, however unappealing, was surely going through hell. Molly had recently read an article by the father of a serial killer. He had written that when you’re a parent, you think the worst thing in the world is to get a call in the middle of the night saying that your child has been murdered by a madman. He had learned, to his everlasting anguish, that there was something even worse. Samuel Mordecai’s grandmother, the woman who had reared him, must be experiencing some of that now.
Molly looked around for a place to sit. The only option was a hard-looking brown vinyl sofa pushed against the wall. She sat on the end and said with total sincerity, “This sure must be a difficult time for you.”
For the first time, Mrs. Huff looked directly at Molly. Her thin, horsey face was scored with cruel ruts that all slanted downward. “Well, honey, you just don’t know what difficult is. You raise up a boy best you can, teach him to be a good Christian God-fearing boy, and then something like this happens and people say behind your back, well, it must be that Dorothy Huff didn’t raise him up right for him to go and do a thing like that.” Her mouth tightened up so hard that her lips whitened. “Even though the boy is no blood kin of yours, and you never asked to get saddled with him.”
“Mrs. Huff,” Molly said, “I think most parents who have children over the age of ten understand that anything can happen when you are raising a child. There are so many influences that are outside your control.”
The old woman’s mouth relaxed a fraction. “Well, ain’t that the truth?”
“It was so kind of you to call Thelma Bassett, Mrs. Huff. It meant a lot to her. She’s a fine woman and she needs some help right now. She thinks she might get a chance to talk to … Donnie Ray. You still call him Donnie Ray?”
Mrs. Huff nodded. “When I call him anything.”
“She wants to know what she might say to him that would persuade him to release the children. She thinks that maybe his being adopted might figure some way in this situation.”
Dorothy Huff looked hard at Molly. “Before this goes any farther, we need to get something real clear. You know I don’t talk to no newspaper or TV people or none of that kind.”
“Yes, you told me on the phone. And I appreciate your—”
“Hold on, missy.” She raised a bony, yellowed palm to Molly. “Just hold on with all your appreciates and such. Let’s get one thing clear. You promised not to talk of this to anyone but Mrs. Bassett. I mean to no one. You clear on that?”
Molly felt bruised by the woman’s bullying manner. “Yes, if that’s what you want.”
Dorothy Huff slapped her hands down hard on the arms of her chair. “If that’s what I want? It’s not a matter of wanting, missy. You break that promise and I’m dead, Mrs. Cates. And you, too, most likely.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, ma’am, you put in the newspaper I said any of this, and I’m deader than Saturday’s meat loaf.”
Molly felt the force of the woman’s certainty and her fear. “Who would kill you?”
“I thought you knew something about cults, Mrs. Writer Woman.”
“I know something about them,” Molly said.
“Then you should know that this group Donnie Ray’s got hisself involved in don’t cotton to people talking about their business. Ain’t you wondered why there are no ex-members coming forward to tell about the group?”
Molly felt a flush of heat. She had indeed wondered about it. Two years ago when she was writing the cult article, she had searched for former Hearth Jezreelites who would talk about Samuel Mordecai and what really went on behind the fences at Jezreel. She had gotten one or two leads, but never found a willing talker at the end of those leads. And the FBI intelligence gatherers were having the same problem now.
“Like Annette.” The old woman shook her head. “You think she’d ever say word one about what life was like there or why she run off?”
“Annette? You mean Donnie Ray’s wife—Annette Grimes?”
“Who else? Pretty little Annette.”
“She isn’t inside the compound?” Molly was stunned.
“Nope. She was smart. Run off while she could. Months ago. Sent me a postcard saying goodbye and thanking me for being nice to her. I was nice to her, too, always liked Annette. Too good for Donnie Ray, if you ask me.”
“Where is Annette now?”
Dorothy Huff gave a snort that might have been an incipient laugh. “Who knows? She’s no dummy. I suppose the Sword Hand of God might have tracked her and she’s dead now.”
“Sword Hand of God? Is that what he calls cult members on the outside?”
“Yes. They don’t want to have all their eggs in one basket.”
“Where are they, Mrs. Huff, and what do they do?”
“They’re all over, probably some back in Austin where you come from. Probably some around here. They work outside and send their paychecks home to Jezreel. The main thing they do is make sure that members who get fed up and leave never talk about it.” She took her index finger and slashed it across her throat.
“How do you know this?”
“I used to visit Donnie Ray and Annette at Jezreel. Back before it got to be too much for me. I heard talk.”
“Why did Annette leave?”
“She just said she had to go and could never get in touch with me again, and she hoped I’d understand. And I do. I hope you do, too, Mrs. Cates.”
“Yes, Mrs. Huff, I do. Nothing you tell me will go beyond me and Mrs. Bassett. I promise.”
Dorothy Huff relaxed her head back onto the chair. “Well, all right, then.”
“Is it true that Donnie Ray was adopted by your daughter?” Molly asked.
“Sure is. Just like I told poor Mrs. Bassett when I phoned her up.”
“I’m wondering why you didn’t tell anyone this before.”
“Oh, mercy. Evelyn—that’s my daughter—back then she didn’t want people to know she couldn’t have a baby on her own. Made her feel less womanly, I guess. So she went away to Austin and come back in a coupla months with this baby and claimed she had him there. I just went along with her story and it got to be a habit, I guess. We never talked about it, and no one asked.”
“You didn’t tell the FBI when they came to see you?”
“No, ma’am. Never thought about it.”
“Is Thelma the first person you’ve told?”
“I guess so. What happened was I saw her on the TV set, so sweet and alone, and I had this vision I should call her and explain it all. So I did. Like you say, anything can happen with children growing up nowadays and particularly when you really don’t know where they come from, I mean where they got their blood from. They could come from any sort of trash heap or even from the criminal class, and I just wanted her to know that Donnie Ray wasn’t really my own kin.”
“Yes, I see. Evelyn adopted him in Austin?”
“That’s what she said.”
“She was married at the time, wasn’t she?”
“Well, sure. Back then, weren’t no adoption by unmarried people like happens now with preverts and all them trash kind of people adopting these innocent little babies. Isn’t that just a crime, Mrs. Cates, them homosexuals adopting babies?” The woman stopped and looked at Molly, raising her eyebrows and tipping her chin up expectantly. Molly kept her face neutral and waited it out.
Mrs. Huff went on: “No, back then you had to be married and go for interviews and have some religious background. Evelyn was married to Jimmy Grimes.” A grimace of disgust twisted her face. “That man was worthless. Him and Evelyn dropped the burden on me without so much as a by-your-leave. You see, they found it was work. Raising up children is work. You’re all the time spooning food into them and cleaning it up as it mucks out of them. You have to put the fear of God almighty into them to keep them on a righteous path. Yes, ma’am, you have to teach them right from wrong, clean from unclean—all them things. It is righteous work, for sure.”
For the first time since she had met Samuel Mordecai, Molly felt a pang of pity for him, or, rather, for Donnie Ray Grimes, the little boy who had had no choice but to depend on this woman. She had just a glimmer why someone would grow up longing for the world to end in fire and catastrophe. “So Donnie Ray lived with you from then on?”
Dorothy Huff let her head drop back on the chair, as if the subject were too heavy to support. “Yes, ma’am. Never lived a day with his mama after that. And Donnie always said, ‘I want to stay right here with you, Gramma. This is my home. You take such good care of me, Gramma. Don’t let my mother have me.’ Well, no danger of that. She never asked for him, not once, never wanted him. He lived here with me in this house until he got to be seventeen and then he run off on me. Hardly said goodbye, never finished grade school, even, never held a real job, left all his junk here.”
“His father—Jimmy Grimes—he’s been dead for some years, hasn’t he?”
“Oh, a long time. He got himself killed shortly after he run off.” She stuck out her lower lip as if that helped her to remember. “Got drunk and run his truck off the road. It was God’s judgment. Jimmy Grimes pulled it down on hisself with both hands. Sure did. He ruined my daughter, never did live up to a obligation in all his life, that man.”
“And your daughter? Evelyn?” Molly had read that Evelyn Huff Grimes had turned to prostitution and died of a drug overdose.
The woman sighed. “Well. Evelyn. She stayed out there in that Las Vegas. Never wrote or called, not on my birthday or Donnie Ray’s neither. She … she got sick and died. Twelve years ago. You knew that, I reckon.”
Molly nodded. “I read it. Did Donnie see much of her before she died?”
“Only once in all them years. He went out there to see her one time.”
“To Las Vegas? When was that?”
“About four months before she died. When he was twenty-one. Just before he started in on all that preaching and apocalypsing business. I told him not to go, but he upped and hitched out there and he come back changed, I can tell you that—full of fury, brimstone. Had him a vision, he said, and God told him to change his name to Sam-u-el Mor-de-cai. And ever since then he’s been apocalypsing and doing all them cult things you read about in the newspaper.”
“It sounds like you don’t hold with Donnie Ray’s beliefs, Mrs. Huff.”
“I’m a good Christian woman. I believe every precious word the Bible says. I believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the wicked, but the Bible says no one can know the hour or the day, not even Donnie Ray Grimes, who now says he’s Sam-u-el Mor-de-cai, thank you very much. My preacher says the boy don’t hold to the Bible, he goes too far into his own imaginings—always did. His religion is more Donnie Ray Grimes than our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“What advice can you give Mrs. Bassett? How can she make an appeal to him?”
Dorothy Huff shrugged. “Don’t matter what she says. He don’t listen, anyways.”
“Mrs. Huff, what can you tell me about the adoption?”
The woman put a hand up to her cheek as if she’d just been slapped. “What do you mean?”
“Well, do you know who his birth parents are? I’d like to locate them. I think it might be helpful.”
“Birth parents?” She repeated it as if she were trying to figure out the meaning. “Oh, his real folks, you mean. No. I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Do you know where Evelyn adopted him?”
“I already told you. She went off to Austin.”
“Yes, but where in Austin? Did she mention the name of an agency? Or was it maybe a private adoption from a lawyer?”
Dorothy Huff’s bony hands tightened on the arms of the chair, as if it were about to be launched into space and she needed to hold on for dear life. The veins in the backs of her hands stuck out like black worms. “She never told me nothing about that. I guess she figured I was good enough to raise up this child but not to know where he come from. When I asked to know what sort of people he come from, she said nobody knowed.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“But somebody would know,” Molly said, thinking aloud. “The agency, or wherever she adopted him from, might not tell her, but they would know where he came from.”
“She said he was abandoned.”
“Abandoned?” Molly felt the stirring of interest like an electric buzz in her chest.
“That’s what she said.”
Molly was almost afraid to ask the next question because if the answer was no, then this could be a dead end. “Are there some papers about the adoption somewhere?”
Mrs. Huff set her mouth into its determined downward arc. “Papers. Haven’t thought about those since Donnie Ray asked me the last time.” She looked down at the threadbare blue rug.
Molly waited. But the woman kept her eyes downcast until Molly couldn’t stand it anymore. “Are there some papers, Mrs. Huff? With dates and names? Something that might help us?”
She looked up and Molly was surprised to see tears in her faded blue eyes. “Mrs. Bassett said you’d be nice and kindly and not ask me hurtful things. This is all so hard to remember.”
Molly leaned forward, following her instinct to close in tight to extract information. She did not like inflicting pain, but if she needed to, she would walk over this woman’s body with hobnailed boots to find out what she needed to know. “Mrs. Huff, the last thing I want to do here is hurt you with my questions, but this might really help us help those children. Do you have any papers here that relate to Donnie Ray’s adoption?”
Mrs. Huff crossed her arms over her bony chest. “Well, I might have.”
Molly decided to back off and approach from a different direction. “You said Donnie had asked about the papers. Did he search?”
The grooves running from Dorothy Huff’s nose to her downturned mouth deepened into valleys of bitterness. “Did he? He come to me when he was seventeen and he was getting all puffed up and big for his britches, you know the way they do, and he said he wanted to find out where he come from and would I help him. I was against it. For his own good, Mrs. Cates. For his own good. I knew for sure it would lead noplace. And even if he did find something out, it would just be trash he’d find.” She let out a huge sigh. “It sure beats me why you’d go to all that trouble to find someone who didn’t never want you in the first place. I told him so. And I told him it sure did hurt me bad that he wanted to find some other family, that I wasn’t good enough for him.”
Molly said, “It seems to be a pretty common thing among people who are adopted—wanting to make some connection with birth parents.”
“I reckon. I never seen him that het up. He wanted to find his mother in the worst way. Upset him bad when it happened just like I told him and he couldn’t find nothing out.”
“What happened?”
“Well, he went off to Austin and run into a brick wall. See, you have to be twenty-one to see your records. He fussed and carried on trying to get me to sign, and when Donnie gets to wanting something, I can tell you there ain’t many in the world can stand up to him, but I did what was best for him. And turns out I was right.”
There were so many questions Molly wanted to ask, she didn’t know where to begin. “What was it he wanted you to sign?”
“Oh, so he could see his records. If the parent signs, someone under twenty-one can look at them records. Evelyn was out there in Las Vegas, so he wanted me to do it. But I wasn’t the mother and hadn’t never adopted him, so I don’t think me signing would’ve worked anyway, but he sure wanted me to do that.” She took a deep breath from having talked so fast. “He just had to wait to twenty-one and it didn’t make no difference because when the time come, there was nothing to find out. Just like I told him.” She said it with grim satisfaction.
“Nothing to find out?”
“The day that boy turned twenty-one, he went back to that state adoption place and he demanded his file. Of course, it didn’t tell him nothing, really, just like I told him.”
“Did you see that adoption file, Mrs. Huff?”
“Well, sure. They give him a copy. He come here waving it around and carrying on. He followed me around the house, getting me to read it to him. See, he don’t read so good. He kept on pushing. He wanted to find his real mother in the worst way. But the record didn’t give him nothing to go on. So he took it out on me. As if I had anything to do with it. See what happens, Mrs. Cates—you do the best you can and you get blamed for everything good you done.”
“It does sound unfair for him to blame you,” Molly said, desperate to keep her talking. “What information was in his file?”
“Well, not much. Like Evelyn said, he was left abandoned, just hours old when he was found, throwed out like a piece of garbage.”
“What was the date?”
“It was 1962. August the third.”
“Who found him?”
“Some man, just passing by the creek.”
“The creek?”
“Waller Creek, down there near the university, in Austin. He was floating in the creek, just like Moses, the man said. Moses. You ever heard anything like that?”
“Floating in the creek?” Molly heard herself repeating everything like an idiot, but each revelation stunned her so much she had to check she’d heard it right.
“In one of them Styrofoam beer cooler things. Don’t that beat all? Moses in a beer cooler.”
Molly wasn’t sure whether she believed it or not, but her entire skin surface tingled. She needed to find out more about this, much more. But there was a problem looming: Adoption records in Texas were closed; nothing short of a court order could get you access through official channels. Her only hope was right here, to extract everything there was to get from this woman. She leaned forward. “Mrs. Huff, this is very important. Do you still have that adoption file?”
Dorothy Huff’s face got hard as Mount Rushmore. “Maybe.”
“I’d like to read it. It might help.”
“Even if I had it, it wouldn’t do you no good. If he couldn’t find nothing, you couldn’t neither.”
“Not necessarily. One of the things I do in my work is research. I’m pretty good at it, but I need some information to start me off. Do you have it?”
She looked down at her old brown slippers. “He might’ve left it here with his other junk, but if he found out I showed it to you, he’d have me killed, his own granny.”
“Mrs. Huff, I wouldn’t show it to anyone else. I’d just use it as a starting point for my research.”
The woman shook her head.
“Mrs. Huff, you told Mrs. Bassett you would do anything you could to help. Well, this is how you can help her.” Molly made herself add, “And little Kimberly. Those children are what’s important here, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes, they surely are. But I don’t see how this would help them.”
Molly was afraid of this question, because she wasn’t sure either. But she needed to answer it because she certainly did want that file. “Well, the negotiators who are talking to Donnie Ray are having trouble communicating with him. They’ve tried everything they know how to do to get him to give up those children. Now they are thinking of letting Thelma Bassett and maybe some of the other parents talk to him, try to get him to see he needs to let those children go before something awful happens. If we could locate his birth mother, maybe she could talk to him, too. We need to try this. Let me look at the file, Mrs. Huff. It might make a difference. Really.” It was as close to begging as she liked to get.
Dorothy Huff set her mouth in its extreme downward arc again. Molly was sure she was going to say no. “Well,” she said, “it don’t surprise me none that those negotiators can’t talk no sense into him. I never could neither. I reckon I could take a look, see if he left it with the rest of his junk, but it ain’t gonna do you no good.” She struggled up out of the chair. “Oh, lordy,” she moaned, teetering on scrawny legs, “I should be in bed.”
Molly reached out to take her elbow. “Let me help you.”
“No, no.” Mrs. Huff shook her hand off. “I ain’t used to no help.” She walked painfully to the door that led into a hallway. “I’ll look, but I don’t guarantee nothing.” She disappeared into a room off the hall and softly closed the door.
Feeling edgy, Molly got to her feet. If Mrs. Huff couldn’t or wouldn’t find the file, this search might dead-end right here. She looked out the picture window to a small stockade-fenced backyard. There wasn’t so much as a blade of grass or a weed growing from the dusty earth.
She switched her attention to the room. On a table under the picture window sat one object: an acrylic square for holding photographs. There was only one picture in it—a black-haired girl with a heart-shaped face and lovely blue eyes. Annette Grimes. Molly recognized her from news photos. There was no other decoration in the room. No pictures on the wall, no photographs of Donnie Ray as a child, no books, no newspapers, no magazines. Not even a Bible. Just a big television, a sofa, a table, and the gold recliner. A motel room had more warmth.
Molly turned when she heard the shuffling tread in the hall. To her delight, Dorothy Huff carried some papers in her hand.
“All that bending down and dust is real bad for me, but here it is, for what it’s worth. I surely do hope you’re a woman of your word.” She stuck the thin stapled sheaf out in Molly’s direction.
Molly felt like kissing the yellowed hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Huff. Thelma Bassett will appreciate this and I surely do. May I keep it and send it back in a few days?” Now all she wanted to do was escape this house, and find a quiet place to sit and read the file. Of course, she should stay a while, interview this woman, listen to stories of what a burden Donnie Ray was as a baby, how wicked he was as a toddler, how unfair it had all been. The problem was, she couldn’t bear to hear it. Anyway, she’d promised not to write anything about Dorothy Huff.
“Mrs. Huff, you’ve been very kind. I need to be getting back to Austin now.” She reached out to shake the woman’s hand, but Dorothy Huff had already turned and shuffled toward the door. Molly followed.
Getting into her truck, Molly felt the old tingle of the hunt vibrating through her body. She didn’t want to wait until she got back to Austin to read the file, so she headed back to McDonald’s, back to the drive-through window. This time she ordered an Egg McMuffin. She was in the nick of time, just minutes before the ten-thirty end to breakfast.
She parked and sipped the orange juice as she looked at the first page of the slender file. It was labeled as property of the Department of Public Welfare of Travis County, which apparently handled adoptions back in 1962. At the top it said “Case Number 3459987—Baby Boy Waller, later named Donnie Ray Grimes.” Molly thumbed through the six pages. Her heart sank. On every page there were words blacked out. She put her Egg McMuffin, still wrapped, on the dashboard and studied the inked-out words. They were all names, last names. Someone had inked out all the important names—the name of the man who found the infant, the name of another witness who saw the man find the infant, the name of the police officer who responded to the call. She felt like banging her head against the steering wheel. If she had any hope of tracing the person who abandoned the baby, those were the names she needed.
Her first reaction was a rush of anger. That old witch Dorothy Huff had done this. But then she calmed down and decided it might have been done by the welfare department. They probably did it to keep the identity of the birth parents confidential. But in this case no one knew who the parents were, so what did it matter? Well, she certainly intended to find out. She settled back to read the file.
The story was essentially as Mrs. Huff had told her. There was a sketchy police summary describing the infant being found by a man jogging along Waller Creek. The policeman who responded to the call immediately took the infant to Brackenridge Hospital and called the county to come and take over. A caseworker’s report picked up the story from there. The infant, a six-pound male, approximately five hours old, was mildly dehydrated but otherwise healthy. He spent only one day in the hospital, and was then placed in a foster family. There was a lengthy part she skimmed over about the baby’s health and the financial arrangements with the foster parents.
Attached at the end were the court records concerning the termination of parental rights when the infant was two months old, and the adoption by James and Evelyn Grimes.
Molly read it through at warp speed. Then she went back and read it again, slowly. It was frustrating because with the crucial names missing it was like trying to get your footing on a glass cliff; there was nothing to grab on to. But she kept reading and got rewarded with something she’d sped over the first time: At the end of the police summary was a line saying, “Male infant and found effects given over to the custody of Public Welfare case worker.” Found effects! Something was found with the baby? She read through the rest of the report carefully searching for any other mention of found effects, but there was none.
She looked at the Egg McMuffin on the dashboard and decided she didn’t want it after all. What she needed now was some information on how adoptions like this were handled, and she didn’t want to wait until she got back to Austin.
She used her car phone to get an Austin operator to look up the number for the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services. Then she managed, after several tries, to get an adoption supervisor on the line.
“Susie Garcia. How can I help you?”
“This is Molly Cates, Miz Garcia. I work for Lone Star Monthly magazine,” she said in the brisk, professional tone she assumed for extracting information from bureaucrats. It was a tone that assumed she had the right to anything she requested. “I need some information on adoption procedure for an article I’m writing and I wonder if you could help me.”
“Well, I’ll try, ma’am.”
Molly decided to start off with something she thought she already knew the answer to. “Miz Garcia, I know that adoption records in Texas are sealed. But what does that mean in actual practice?”
“It means that adoption records are closed to everyone except the adult adoptee and the adoptive parents.”
“I see. This woman I’m writing about—she’s an adult adoptee—got a copy of her file, but it has lots of names blacked out. Do you do that?”
“Of course. We have to de-identify the file before we give it to the adoptee.”
“De-identify?”
“Well, yes. To protect the privacy of the birth parents.”
“Yes, I see why you’d do that, but on this file, other names are blacked out, too.”
“Well, ma’am, that would probably be because those people might be able to give information that could lead to exposing the identity of the birth parents.”
“But in this woman’s case,” Molly persisted, “she was abandoned, and the parents were never found. Why would the file be de-identified if there’s no identity known?”
“Well, it’s our policy. I suppose it’s done so that the adoptee is not even tempted to try a search. It would be a waste of time anyway. If we couldn’t find the birth parents, she couldn’t either.”
“How hard do you look in a case like that, with an abandoned infant?”
“The law just says we are required to conduct due and diligent search. We give it a good try. If we can’t find the parents after several months we go to court to have the parental rights terminated so we can put the child up for adoption.”
“In the meantime the child is in foster care?”
“That’s right.”
“What about the original file? That’s not de-identified, is it?”
“Well, of course not. We keep the original in our files with all names intact, but no one is allowed to see it.”
“Ms. Garcia, when an infant is abandoned, as in the case I’m writing about, your agency takes custody of the baby, right?”
“Yes.”
“What happens to any clothes or items that might be left with the baby?”
“Funny you should ask. We had one just a few weeks ago. A newborn baby girl left in the Kmart parking lot with seven jars of strained prunes, a plastic nursing bottle, and a beautiful silver St. Christopher medal. What we did in that case was toss the prunes because we worried about contamination. But the medal and the bottle we gave to the foster mother when we put the baby into her care.”
“Then what? The baby will get adopted, won’t she?”
“If we don’t find the birth parents, and we haven’t so far. Oh, yes, she’ll get adopted. In a flash. She’s a real sweetheart.”
“Then what will happen to her stuff—the bottle and the St. Christopher medal?”
“The foster mother gives it to the adoptive mother. Such objects often turn out to be very precious, you know—the only link that child has with its birth parents. So we make an effort to preserve everything we can.”
“So anything abandoned with the baby would end up with the adoptive parents?”
“Yes, eventually. That’s what usually happens.”
“Would that have been true back in the sixties, too?”
“I imagine. I don’t go back that far. This sounds interesting. What’s the article about?”
“Oh, it’s just the story of a woman who was adopted in the sixties and has been searching for her parents.”
To prepare herself for the ordeal of another dose of Dorothy Huff, Molly fortified herself with more coffee. She decided not to phone first because she wanted to watch the woman’s reaction to her questions.
When Mrs. Huff opened the door this time, she held a half-smoked cigarette between her fingers. She looked disconcerted to see Molly.
“Mrs. Huff,” Molly said. “I hate to bother you again, but there’s just one more favor I need to ask. I stopped at McDonald’s for lunch, and I read the file there. It mentions something about the effects found with the infant. I wonder if I could take a look at them before I drive back.”
Mrs. Huff assumed a quizzical look. “Effects?”
“Yes. You know, the things left with Donnie Ray when he was abandoned.”
The old woman stood perfectly still, the only movement the smoke from her cigarette drifting up her arm. “It says that in the file?”
“Yes, in the police report.”
Mrs. Huff turned without speaking and walked inside, wafting smoke behind her. Molly followed without being invited. She watched the woman walk to the gold chair and mash the cigarette into a coffee cup that was sitting on the arm. “Well,” Dorothy Huff said with her head down, “there was the beer cooler, you know. I told you that. But it was old even then, and just one of them cheap ones you get at gas stations, and it just dried up and fell to bits some years ago. I threw it out.”
Molly followed a hunch. “What about the other things?”
“You mean that thing he was wrapped in?”
“Yes.” Molly’s heart fluttered. “Do you still have it?”
“Just an old robe. Nothing to see.”
“Will you get it for me, please?”
Dorothy Huff’s face hardened into a stubborn look that worried Molly. “I really don’t see—”
“Please, just let me look. It might be helpful in the search. For Mrs. Bassett and little Kimberly,” she added.
Dorothy Huff sighed, but once again she turned and shuffled off. This time she was muttering something about if she’d known how much trouble all this would be, she would have stayed in bed where she belonged. She was gone longer this time and there was still nothing to look at in the living room. Except the coffee cup. Molly walked over and peered inside. There were six cigarette butts. Six in the forty minutes since Molly had left. The woman had a prodigious habit.
Finally Mrs. Huff returned carrying a flat white cardboard box about the size you’d get if you bought a sweater at Foley’s. Molly wanted to grab it and run, but she stood patiently as the woman carried it across the room. She set it down on the table gingerly, as if it contained live rattlesnakes. She put her hands on the box, then paused. “Mrs. Cates, are you a saved woman?”
Molly didn’t hesitate. “No, Mrs. Huff. I imagine it’s a great comfort to those who are, but I seem unable to believe in anything I can’t see.”
Mrs. Huff nodded as if that was exactly what she’d expected to hear and raised the lid of the box. She stood aside to let Molly look inside. It was a garment made of a shiny red fabric, neatly folded. “See,” she said in a hushed voice, “that’s it.”
“Would you take it out for me?” Molly asked.
Mrs. Huff sighed. She reached in and lifted it out. Holding it with her fingertips, she gave it a shake to open the folds. It was a kimono, clearly old, but still a vivid red. Slowly Mrs. Huff turned it to show Molly the back. Embroidered there was a huge multicolored dragon, coiled in a circle. It had lots of heads and tongues. Molly was amazed: Thirty-three years it had sat in the box and the colors were still vivid, gaudy even.
“The mark of the Beast,” Dorothy Huff intoned.
A dampish, musty smell emanated from the garment. It took several seconds for Molly to make the connection. Beasts—Samuel Mordecai talked a lot about beasts. What was it he’d said? Something about being helpless and wrapped in the mantle of the Beast. My God. Was he referring to this, to being a baby wrapped in this gaudy garment and put out to die? She had assumed it was metaphorical talk, images from Revelation, but it was literal. She thought about a little boy whose only connection with the mother who gave him birth was this. Her heart was thudding.
“When did Donnie Ray first see this, Mrs. Huff?” And then she asked a question she should have asked the first time she was here. “And when did he learn about the details of his abandonment and adoption?”
“Well, let me see.” Dorothy Huff stuck her bottom lip out, an affectation Molly now recognized as a pose of trying to remember. “Everybody says you should tell children they been adopted early on. So I told Donnie Ray, oh, maybe when he was two or three. You know, when he could understand.”
“Two or three?” Molly repeated.
“Yes, ma’am. And I showed him this. Had to warn him. You know, while there was still time.”
“Warn him?”
“Yes.” She shook the kimono in front of Molly’s face. “About the Beast and how careful he had to be to overcome this evil sign, this early influence.”
“Early influence?”
She looked at Molly with exasperation, as if she were a very slow child. “Well, you can see what with starting out life like this, marked in this terrible way, it was important for him to be careful. So when he was bad, I’d have to show him this to remind him of his inheritance. I had to warn him. Children are forgetful, so I had to do it often.”
Molly didn’t know if she could bear to hear more, but she said, “You’d warn him about this robe?”
“The image of the Beast, Mrs. Cates. That great dragon who waits to devour children at the moment of birth, the ancient serpent who leads the whole world astray. The Book of Revelation. You not being a Christian woman, I suppose you don’t know much about them things, but the boy was born under the image of the Beast, and he needed special handling.”
Molly knew she should follow up, ask about the special handling, but she didn’t think she could take it right now. “Mrs. Huff, if I’m very careful, could I take this with me? I’ll get it back to you with the file in a few days.”
“Well …”
“It could be important for helping the children at Jezreel.”
“Take it, then.” She flapped a hand. “This has just wore me out. I was just fixing to lay down for a nap.”
“Of course. I won’t keep you. Thanks for your help, Mrs. Huff.”
Molly left the house with the box under her arm.
Out on the highway, she checked to be sure her Fuzzbuster was working. Then she rolled down the windows and pushed the speedometer up to seventy. She turned on her new Rolling Stones tape with the volume at full blast—ungodly, satanic music to drive out the smell of Dorothy Huff’s house, she thought, as the hot wind blew through the cab and whipped her hair wildly around her head.